Book of Days

St. John’s Eve, tonight, brings Midsummer. In the seasonal round of the year, we now sit directly opposite Midwinter and Christmas. The celebrations for both Midwinter and Midsummer are old celebrations, older than you or I or anyone can recall, older even than the events assigned to them by the early Church, for the Church early on recognized that honey draws more flies than vinegar, and in that spirit, old pagan celebrations continued but with new names and new focus. Hence the birth of Christ was set at the winter solstice and the birth of John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, setting the path straight for the savior, was set at the summer solstice.

St. John is unusual in that he is remembered not just on the day of his death (which is the case with all the other saints) but also on the day of his birth. And as is often the case with traditional holidays, it is the eve the night before when the real celebration occurs. My take on this is that there is a certain magic to nighttime events: perceived magic if not real, though our ancestors thought nights like Midsummer and Midwinter full of real magic and open to the realm of fairies and sprites and other folks of parallel universes. You need only look to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set on this very night, to grasp the beliefs.

But no matter whether you give credence to these other realms or not, there is no denying the air of mystery that accompanies a celebration at night. We hang fairy lights in the trees, we light candles and beseeching fires, we walk amongst flowers that bloom only at night and spice the air we breathe. We take our celebration outdoors and the stars and moon are above us and this is infinitely more mysterious than the ceilings in our homes. This, too, is magic, as powerful as any other.

Midsummer and St. John’s Day are not much celebrated in the States, much to our loss. But in other places, this is a night to spend out in the open air. In Scandinavia, with the sun at its northernmost point in the sky, this is the time of the Midnight Sun (how magical is that?). It is a night there for bonfires and meals of pickled herring and new potatoes with sour cream. Further south in Italy bonfires are also part of the night, but the meals vary by region. In Rome, the Midsummer meal centers around snails; local belief holds that eating snails, horned as they are like devils, will protect you from Midsummer mischief. In the towns of Northern Italy, Midsummer is a time to break out balsamic vinegar, aged as long as a hundred years. Every part of the meal has some of this nectar of the gods in it, for the lore of the land says that this is the time of year when the must enters the grape on the vine, and it is the must that will eventually become both the wine and the balsamic vinegar (again, magic). The must is the juice, crucial to both, for good balsamic vinegar is made from must just as is wine. It is then aged all those years in casks of various types of woods: at least a dozen years, but, as mentioned above, sometimes a hundred years or more.

It is a night to go and gather plants for their magical properties: fern seed and St. John’s Wort. The latter will protect you from evil, the former, if gathered properly, is believed to confer the power of invisibility. But not without some peril: the seeds are fiercely guarded by the fairy folk who know more of these secrets than do we. The magical properties of plants also play into Shakespeare’s comedy. Have you ever wondered what is the “herb” (a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound) that Oberon instructs Puck to fetch and squeeze the juice of onto the eyelids of Titania and then of the lovers? Well, these are the things I wonder about. Oberon goes on to tell us that maidens call it “love-in-idleness,” but in modern terms it turns out the herb is a flower known as Viola Tricolor, also known as Heartsease or Wild Pansy. You may have some blooming now in your summer garden. So much magic, so close to home. Make the most of it. Happy Midsummer.

Image: Viola Tricolor, Plate No. 227 in Bilder ur Nordens Flora by C.A.M. Lindman, published in 1905. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

And now it is Old Midsummer: St. John’s Eve. It is a night that will go by unnoticed by most Americans, but in other cultures it is the beginning of the midsummer revels with good food, storytelling, divination and games, and, most especially, bonfires. This is especially true in Scandinavia, where the days at this time of year are particularly long. In Helsinki, the sun will shine for nearly 19 hours today. The sun has just passed its northernmost point in the sky with the solstice two days ago, and already it is progressing toward the opposite of that. Come December, that 19 hours in Helsinki will be of darkness. And in these Lands of the Midnight Sun, these lands of polar opposites, a celebration marking each of these events should come as no surprise.

While we in the States (at least in the Lower 49) are all too familiar with the celebration surrounding the Winter Solstice, the celebration of St. John’s Eve and St. John’s Day at the summer solstice has never gained much of a foothold here. My partner’s cousin married a woman from Sweden and they settled in California and when Ulrika’s first St. John’s Eve in the States arrived, she was pretty disappointed. Yes, she could create a celebration of her own, but part of the charm of most St. John’s Eve celebrations is the communal atmosphere. Folks from the community typically gather and celebrate together, outdoors in the night filled with sunlight, at a communal bonfire, and there was none of that for Ulrika in California.

Even here in Lake Worth, where businesses like Polar Bakery and Midnight Sun Motel are signs of the largest community of Finns outside of Finland, not much will be happening tonight that I am aware of. There was a bonfire on Saturday, the night of the solstice this year, at the American-Finnish Community Club west of town. But that was on Saturday and tonight, as far as I know, the field out behind the Club will remain dark.

Community or not, the power to celebrate a day is within each of us. Lighting a fire in your own backyard fire pit or even just lighting a candle is, I think, a fine way of honoring this ancient celebration. I hope Ulrika is doing at least as much. I hope she is serving pickled herring and new potatoes with sour cream, and eating strawberries by the fire, all part of the traditions in her Swedish homeland.

In other parts of Europe, St. John’s Eve is a night to go and gather fern seed for its magical properties. Gathered at the proper time, fern seed was thought to confer the power of invisibility upon the person who held it. Gathering it comes not without some peril, however: the seeds are fiercely guarded by the fairy folk. Be that as it may, this is the only night to do so for their magical properties. And of course the gathering of St. John’s Wort would be done tonight. Hang a clump of this herb at windows and doors to keep evil away.

As with Christmas in December, it is the eve that is the period of the holiday that is more charged with magic and mystery. And for St. John’s Eve, no one has done a better job of conjuring that magic than William Shakespeare. His comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set on this night and tunes into folk belief that the portals between worlds are more easily transgressed on nights just like this. There is no better time of year to read his play again or to watch the film (the 1999 adaptation by Michael Hoffman, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania and Rupert Everett as Oberon is really quite good), and if you are in a place where the play is being performed tonight, well, you should not even think twice about what to do: go.

Even if all you do is eat a fresh strawberry, do something to mark this magical night, and if you can, do it outdoors. To take part in marking this night is to take part in something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our problems and cares. It is to take part in the community of folks marking this night across the centuries, and that is community indeed. Happy Midsummer.

Image: Last year’s solstice bonfire at the American-Finnish Community Club. Even in the heat of a Florida summer night, we love a good bonfire.